PSA: Be Careful When You Long Rest in Baldur's Gate 3

ign.com:

Picture this: Faerûn, 1492 DR. You're walking down the road with your pals when you suddenly smell smoke. Around the bend, you come across an inn engulfed in flames. Inside, you can hear multiple voices screaming for help. You know you should rush in and save them, but your party is a bit battered from the last battle with the local goblins. So you sit down, make camp, and take a long rest to make sure you're fit to save everyone. Hours later, your health replenished, you stand up, only to discover the inn has burned to ash and everyone died.

Well, yeah, what did you think was going to happen?

There's been a lot of discussion lately in the Baldur's Gate 3 community about the intersection of long rests, missable events, and quest progression. A number of people have reported finding themselves in situations where a quest seemed to progress without their input, a character moved on from the location they were supposed to meet them in, or someone died because the player didn't help them fast enough. Several theories have been thrown around as to why this is happening, and one prevalent suggestion is that taking too many long rests can push the clock forward and cause certain events to progress.

For instance, one player reported a situation with an early quest involving a druidic ritual they wanted to stop. They claimed they went off to do some other things, but when they came back the ritual had completed and they weren't given a chance to stop it. Multiple other users replied, suggesting the player may have taken too many long rests.

But is that really what's going on? Should we all be terrified of long resting? We checked in with Larian Studios to see if long rests do, in fact, progress the clock forward. This was the